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Sunday, July 24, 2016

Indiscretion (Granfalloon Productions/Lifetime, 2016)

I watched last night’s latest “world premiere” movie on
Lifetime, Indiscretion. This one was
obviously intended for theatrical release, not only because a lot of swear
words (ranging, most likely, from “fuck” to “shit” to the “God-” in “Goddamn”)
were deleted from the soundtrack — at times the sound got awfully patchy as the
Lifetime censors took out the seven deadly words from the script by John
Stewart Muller (who also directed) and Laura Boersma — but because the imdb.com
page for the film says it was shot in the 2.35-1 old CinemaScope ratio even
though we were watching it at the common 1.85-1 digital TV ratio, and also
because the lead actress was advertised as “Academy Award™ winner Mira
Sorvino!” She plays Veronica Simon, psychiatrist (we get to see her “in
session” with several of her patients and we get periodic shots of her with a
Black woman whom we assume is her
therapist until … ) and wife of U.S. Senate candidate Jake Simon (Cary Elwes),
who’s currently a New Orleans City Councilmember and is running as a Republican
for the Senate against a Democratic incumbent on a platform that includes
support for gun control. Some of the other people in the movie comment on the
unlikelihood of that, noting that Muller and Boersma were aware that a
Republican — and a Southern
Republican, at that — would never in the real world take any position on guns
other than abject fealty to the Second Amendment and the late Justice Antonin
Scalia’s and the National Rifle Association’s reading of it. Jake Simon’s poll
numbers are going down because of rumors that he had an affair, so apparently
on the principle that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose,
Veronica launches into an affair of her own with Victor Barnard (Christopher
Backus) and director Muller gives us quite a few hot soft-core porn scenes
between them that make it look like they’re ravenous with lust for each other.

Then what’s begun as a steamy sex thriller quickly snowballs into a series of
barely connected incidents that spiral farther and farther into total unbelievability,
as Veronica tries to break off the affair and Victor responds by becoming the
stalker from hell, turning up at her office (while her husband is there because
he hoped to surprise her and do a quickie lunch date!) and then leaving a
bouquet at her home. When mom won’t see him Victor seduces the Simons’ rather
airheaded daughter Lizzy (Katherine McNamara, a luscious piece of blonde
teenagerhood that probably had the straight guys in the audience at least
sitting up in their chairs, if not outright creaming) and takes Polaroid
pictures of them making love the way he had previously done with Veronica —
only Veronica at least had the good sense to burn them almost as soon as they
were taken, while Victor saved the ones of him and Lizzy and “let” Veronica
discover them later. The film climaxes (so to speak) at a hunting party Jake
has gone on with the state’s governor, Wallace (Marco St. John), both to get an
“in” with the governor’s 1-percenter contributors and to re-establish his
hunting bona fides after his
stand for gun control tanked his standing in the polls. Jake, Victor, Veronica
(who wasn’t invited to the party — it was supposed to be male-only — but
crashed it after “discovering” the pics of Victor and Lizzy) and a bunch of
other people are running around with guns, and at one point Victor trains his
gun, not at the deer they’re supposed to be shooting at (which makes this sound
like the prequel to Bambi), but
on Jake. Jake turns around in time to see Victor aiming at him and gets the gun
away. They struggle and Jake’s face is bloodied, then they both reach for the
gun (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney called to tell you he’s doing
just fine in Gstaad) and Victor kills Jake, after which Lizzy picks up the gun
and fires it at Victor. At first we think they’re both dead but it turns out
Victor is alive and makes a full recovery but ends up in a mental institution.
It also turns out that when Jake was killed Veronica was picked to replace him
as Louisiana’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate and won, and the Black
woman we thought was her therapist was actually a reporter for “GNN”
(apparently they couldn’t use the real name of CNN but they copied their logo
almost exactly except for replacing the “C” with a “G”) interviewing her for a
TV broadcast and getting the whole story public.

Only there’s a twist which is still baffling me and which I can’t figure out whether
Muller and Boersma intend us to believe this or just regard it as one of
Victor’s delusions: Veronica goes to visit Victor in the institution and Victor
“reminds” her that the whole plot was Veronica’s idea: she would seduce him and trigger his mental issues so that he would kill
Jake, then she would kill Victor, pass it off as self-defense, enter the Senate
race and win it — only the plot went off the rails when Victor seduced Lizzy,
which wasn’t part of her mom’s plan. Victor pleads with Veronica to admit all
this publicly, Veronica says he’s just being delusional, and she walks out on
him and leaves him behind in the institution. I suspect the writers were being
pretty delusional themselves expecting anybody to believe this as a legitimate
reversal, especially since it comes at the very end of the proceedings and
therefore can’t even be justified as a mid-movie “goosing” of the plot to keep
the audience interested. Frankly, through most of the movie I had thought
Victor was in the pay of Jake Simon’s political opponents, assigned to seduce
his wife and then get caught having an affair, thereby embarrassing both Simons
and plunging his poll numbers even farther into the abyss — and that at least
would have been slightly more
believable. Director Muller brings quite a strong sense of style to this film,
especially in two suspenseful scenes where women are being stalked — in one,
Lizzy has just walked out of a party hosted by one of her age-peer friends when
she realizes it was just a set-up to get her to have sex with a rather nerdy
guy who’s interested in her, and there’s a thrilling scene in which she walks
down the mean streets of New Orleans and several sinister-looking males pass by
her before her mom finally
locates her and drives her home. In another, it’s Veronica who’s being stalked
by Victor in a parking garage, and just as she gets to her car and we think
she’s evaded him, he turns up inside
(how did he get in?). But those are just two good scenes in an otherwise
ridiculous movie whose writers — one of whom is also the director, meaning that
he has no one to blame but himself and his script collaborator — pile so many
unlikely incidents on top of each other we run out of reasons to care about
these people. It also doesn’t help that it’s one of those stories in which the
only way it hangs together at all is if we believe these people are such
complete idiots they don’t do anything any normal person would do in this
situation, like call the police — O.K., we get that Veronica doesn’t want to
involve the police because it could hurt her husband’s chances in the election,
but really! Especially when it
involves a direct threat not only to her but her daughter!